Empower Your Advocates

Connect With Your Customers

Services

Social business solutions offer a potentially bewildering array of features, customisation points and configuration settings. We can help design and configure your community platform to best support your unique use cases and organisational culture.

Are you just starting your community journey? Looking for a platform on which to build your effort, whether internal or external? Need advice on the best vendor to partner with, or the right package to support your plans? Our independent analysis is what you need.

Implementing social business is much more than just deploying a system and inviting users. User adoption, integration with existing systems, measuring achievement of business objectives and return on investment are just some of the compelling reasons to seek expert advice.

What else?

Community Management

One of the most critical success factors for online communities, the community manager leads the effort to build, grow, and manage the platform. We can provide support and mentoring for your own team, or fill-in on a short- or medium-term basis.

Development & Customisation

Using our extensive network of partners, we can satisfy almost any demand for customised features and applications – from functionality tweaks to custom tiles and widgets, to mobile applications and integrations.

Global Support

We support organisations across the world, with ongoing customer projects across EMEA and North America. We specialise in working remotely – a great demonstration of the technology we recommend – but travel for face-to-face engagements as required.

Who are we?

Fostering Community is a small but perfectly-focused software consultancy, helping our clients to develop online communities inside and outside their corporate boundaries.

Founded by Stuart McIntyre in 2016, we work with organisations of all sizes and verticals to plan, build, launch and manage their interactive intranets and customer communities. At Fostering Community, we believe in the principles that drive the evolving web: transparency, sharing/collaboration, authenticity, and trust.

Taking a holistic use-case driven approach, we work first on the detailed transformational requirements of the business, through discovery and definition phases, to the point at which a solution can be designed that truly meets the needs of the platform's users, whilst supporting teams and generating measurable value for the wider business.

Working closely with carefully selected vendors, including Jive Software and IBM, Fostering Community are independent specialists, widely recognised for our contribution to social business thought-leadership - regularly speaking at vendor and industry events, publishing content and hosting podcasts.

Stuart is also a member of the Change Agents Worldwide network of progressive and passionate professionals, specialising in Future of Work technologies and practices. We also advocate the Working Out Loud practice, combining conventional wisdom about relationships with modern ways to reach and engage people.

Latest news

The State of Community Management 2016 provides a snapshot of the progress and changes in community management, based on research of more than 300 communities from organizations large and small, which span a range of use cases, sectors and industries. Every year we continue to build upon the past research and explore more deeply topics that TheCR Network members highlight as crucial to building a better understanding of the power and impact of community approaches. Our three key findings, driven by your answers, were: Strategy: defining shared value drives success. Operations: empowering members accelerates engagement. Tactics: measure what you want […]

Here at Fostering Community, we are great fans of Working Out Loud – John Stepper’s published approach to working in the open, transparently and with authenticity. As he describes it: Instead of networking to get something, you lead with generosity, investing in relationships that give you access to other people, knowledge, and possibilities. Part of the process is learning ways to make your work visible and frame it as a contribution. The core community framework that sustains Working Out Loud is the Circle: Circles help you develop a mindset and habit you can apply to any goal. These small peer […]

New beginnings are always exciting. Nerve-wracking? Yes, that too. But a new start never fails to make one want to get out of bed and take on the challenge of what is ahead. That’s where we are today. However, this is more than just a new beginning, a new path… This community model of communication and collaboration has had so much potential for so long. Through my previous consultancy businesses – Collaboration Matters and Social 365 – I’ve lived the heady days of the noughties when ‘social’ was the new buzzword and everyone was trying to catch the ClueTrain, through the ‘E2.0’ era when every […]